{"id":61013,"date":"2017-03-02T10:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T15:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/upstater.com\/?p=61013"},"modified":"2017-03-24T11:46:01","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T15:46:01","slug":"zoe-bellot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upstater.com\/zoe-bellot\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoe Bellot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI really love words,\u201d says artist Zoe Bellot<\/a>. A native Parisian who was drawn to the US while studying American literature at the Sorbonne, she has made art objects incorporating language since childhood. But not until spending a year in New York City doing research for a Ph.D. did she decide to drop out of academia and become a full-time artist. So in 2007, when she was 25, Bellot enrolled on scholarship in a three-year program in painting and drawing at the National Academy School, located across Fifth Avenue from the Guggenheim Museum.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, she also began assembling kinetic music boxes containing miniature worlds, using old suitcases and other materials she found in dumpsters; she taught herself how to automate the music boxes by learning how to build an electrical circuit on the internet.<\/p>\n

But even as Bellot\u2019s creativity blossomed, life was tough, with the rent on her Harlem apartment consuming half of her $1,000-a-month budget. \u201cThere were days I had to be resourceful and eat pasta with olive oil,\u201d she recalls. She was too poor to afford to buy the plates to learn printing; instead, she dismantled her bookshelf, using the wood to carve the blocks for a book piece called Lettres<\/a>. Each page is printed with the portrait and initials of one of 26 authors whose names were derived from her books strewn across her floor.<\/p>\n

But the need to be resourceful was a blessing. \u201cI did my first woodcuts out of necessity, but it\u2019s a medium I really love,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s very direct, and there\u2019s something sculptural about the carving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Bellot divides her time between the very same apartment in Harlem and a rental house and studio garage in Hudson. She says the need to be resourceful was a blessing. \u201cI did my first woodcuts out of necessity, but it\u2019s a medium I really love,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s very direct, and there\u2019s something sculptural about the carving.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating in 2011, she began teaching French at a private school in Tribeca, where she created a blog called Word of the Day, posting a daily word, along with its definition, an illustration, a sentence using it in context, and an audio link.<\/p>\n

Counted among Bellot\u2019s influences are her grandmother, who kept a journal with funny words, and writers whose style tends toward \u201cstraightforwardness, simplicity, and economy,\u201d she says, including Emily Dickinson, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, J. M. Coetzee, and Jim Harrison.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s the structure of language itself, along with puzzles, games, and puns, that mostly informs Bellot\u2019s art. \u201cI use grammar in my work,\u201d she says, \u201cthough you don\u2019t have to know that to appreciate it.\u201d The structure of the box containing her book-poem, 3 East 3rd, for instance, forms a kind of syntax, she says. The piece, which was inspired by a New York City hostel with tiny rooms, consists of a triangular box fitted with numerous rectangular blocks printed with fragments of overheard conversation that can be multitudinously arranged. \u201cThere\u2019s always a system that determines which form the word takes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellot says she\u2019s found that in discovering \u201cthe English version of myself,\u201d she can \u201cstop looking for equivalents of my personality in French.\u201d Instead, she says, she likes to use her English version \u201cas a free card. You can be more yourself [in a new language] than back home, because you discover different parts of yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellot began traveling from Harlem to Hudson in 2012. These days, she and her boyfriend, architect Scott Benedict, head upstate most weekends and throughout the summer to her garage studio, where she makes woodcut and stencil prints from a press that was originally designed for printing linens.<\/p>\n

Last fall, she served as artist-in-residence at the Hudson Opera House, where she is still working on turning two abandoned pianos into an artwork. While one side of each instrument will be converted into a bar, the other will display a series of shadow boxes whose content relates to Offenbach\u2019s opera Tales of Hoffman and the history of the Opera House, including its multiple former uses as well as famous visitors. Bellot plans to finish the work this spring.<\/p>\n

Another current project is Horoscope, a website page that features a new pairing of a word and artwork every two weeks. The results are both cryptic and contradictory. \u201cVoyage,\u201d for instance, is accompanied by a painted wooden box in which the outline of a map of Manhattan is filled with red shapes fashioned out of cardboard. A blue wooden car is positioned on the yellow ground, and the digital photograph is captioned \u201cParler anglais? Infinitif. Parlez francais, definitif.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellot\u2019s dream project is still in the planning stages: constructing an amusement park themed around language. \u201cI want to create a sensation, to do some performance art that\u2019s of the moment, to give people an experience,\u201d she says, noting that she\u2019s searching for a piece of land. The first ride would be a train related to punctuation, to be called \u201cComma, or Coma.\u201d \u201cIt would be motorized and made out of found objects,\u201d she says. \u201cIt would be scary, giving people a good dose of adrenaline\u2014an alternative to drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

In Bird, the first in Zoe Bellot\u2019s \u201cBon Voyage\u201d series\u2014a title suggesting artifacts associated with memory, adventure, and departures\u2014a clay bird poised on a branch inside a battered record-player case twirls around when you turn on a switch; hit the second switch, and Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u201cHow Sweet It Is\u201d plays. The interior walls of the case are painted to resemble a skyscape seen through rows of windows, and a 45 on the imaginary turntable is stationary. As an homage to Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s poem \u201cThe Raven,\u201d the piece is rife with irony and pop dissonance, even as the worn wooden case, complete with lid, suggests the passage of time and invites portability\u2014baggage bringing spiritual solace on the journey of life.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"


Sailor, which is an homage to Hemingway\u2019s The Old Man and the Sea, consists of a bearded figurine wearing a cap and holding a bucket and a stick sitting on a miniature mattress inside a leather hatbox lined with midnight-blue fabric, and adorned with a series of round mirrors and a piece of burlap resembling flotsam, or possibly a fisherman\u2019s net. The piece suggests not so much a nautical milieu as a child\u2019s dream of it. The sailor\u2019s stick lights up as he spins on the mattress to the tune of the Pointer Sisters\u2019 synth-driven, New Wave R&B hit \u201cI\u2019m So Excited.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI really love words,\u201d says artist Zoe Bellot. A native Parisian who was drawn to the US while studying American literature at the Sorbonne, she has made art objects incorporating language since childhood. 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